missmiis : Adventures in identity management

Poll results from the inaugural FIM Team User Group meeting

We had our very first FIM Team User Group meeting yesterday, with attendees from all around the world. There was some good FIM chat going on in the messaging window – I think this will really be the best thing about these meetings, especially for those who, like I was for a long time, fly solo in their FIM work and don’t get much chance to talk to other people doing the same thing.

As it was a “getting to know you” meeting we did a number of polls. There were around 40 people in the meeting, and around 25 to 30 people responded to each question. Continue reading ›

2013 06 13 Carol User Group Comments (0) Permalink

Navigation Bar Resources not appearing

An odd one today. Several Navigation Bar Resources just would not appear for the Set members that should have been able to see them. Here’s what I observed:

The Administrators could see and use the NBRs,
The NBRs were listed when I viewed members of the Set of NBRs with the particular Usage Keyword,
The MPR was correctly configured,
The members of the user Set could see most of the NBRs with their Usage Keyword – but three were stubbornly unavailable.

I tried all sorts of things. In the end I deleted the relevant Usage Keyword from each of the missing NBRs, submitted the change, then re-added exactly the same Usage Keyword. And then the NBRs appeared!

I looked for trailing spaces in the Usage Keywords as I deleted them – couldn’t see anything wrong. But anyway, at least re-adding them fixed it, and I’ll just chalk it up to “boy that was weird”.

2013 06 12 Carol FIM 2010 R2
Troubleshooting Comments (2) Permalink

I’m starting a FIM User Group – and you’re all invited!

I’m really excited to be posting this today: With the enthusiastic support of my employer Unify Solutions, myself and some of my FIM Team colleagues are starting an online FIM User Group, and you’re all invited to join! The User Group will take the form of a once monthly web conference, hosted on Lync Online, and I’m expecting lots of interesting discussions and presentations about all things FIM.

One of the reasons I’m really keen to do this is that I miss TEC. It was such a great opportunity to catch up with what other FIM experts were doing and I want that back in my life. So please get in touch if you want to join the group, and also let me know if you have ideas for anything you’d like to demonstrate or present yourself, or any discussion topics you’d like to have included on the agenda.

Head over to this page for more information, and send an email to the address you’ll find there.

2013 05 27 Carol FIM 2010
FIM 2010 R2
Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

Putting this here to give me a chance of remembering next time I do this – because I will.

I was trying to recompile my custom workflow library and I got the error “Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.” Eventually I remembered that I’d recently installed a new FIM service pack – once I unpacked the new versions of Microsoft.IdentityManagement.WebUI.Controls.dll and Microsoft.IdentityManagement.WFExtensionInterfaces.dll the solution compiled just fine.

2013 05 15 Carol FIM 2010
FIM 2010 R2
VB.NET
Workflow Comments (0) Permalink

Logging failed requests to a SQL table

Lately I’ve been doing lots of work with logging various FIM-related data to SQL tables and presenting them with SQL Reporting Services (SSRS). I’ve been having some good fun with SSRS – there seems to be a lot you can do with just a basic understanding of queries and parameters – and I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface so far.

2013 04 21 Carol FIM 2010
FIM 2010 R2
powershell
Reporting
SQL Comments (1) Permalink

Workaround for Search Scope Advanced Filter empty search string problem

R2 made a change to search scopes that I wasn’t particularly happy with – in fact as far as I’m concerned they broke search. The Advanced Filter was offered as a way to restore old functionality, however that introduced two new bugs – clicking search with nothing in the search box returned nothing (listed here as a known problem) and clicking Advanced Search with nothing in the search box gives you a bunch of unusable filters you have to delete.

2013 04 03 Carol FIM 2010 R2
Search Scopes Comments (0) Permalink

Some Housekeeping XPath Queries

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about maintaining data quality in the FIM Portal. When you’re working with a lot of referenced objects (and it really is the best way to go in the Portal) you find yourself copying string data around a lot. So, for example, a person selects a business unit object from an Identity Picker, but I also want to copy the business unit name to their Department field, for sync’ing to AD and other such purposes. How do we protect ourselves from unexpected failures in these processes, leading to inconsistencies in the data we’re trying to maintain?

2013 03 23 Carol FIM 2010
FIM 2010 R2
powershell Comments (1) Permalink

FIMDelta by Alexey Skalozub

Just wanted to give a shout out to Alexey Skalozub who has shared a great looking utility on github to help us with those pesky FIM Portal configuration migrations: https://github.com/pieceofsummer/FIMDelta

Essentially it’s a visualisation and selection tool for the changes.xml file produced by the Schema and Policy migration tools. The really great thing he’s done is produced it in tree form showing all the dependant objects, so you can easily select just the configuration objects you want to migrate, automatically including all their dependencies.

This is really going to be very useful. Thanks for sharing Alexey!

Tagged Migration

2013 03 19 Carol FIM 2010
FIM 2010 R2
Migration Comments (0) Permalink

Returning an object from a PowerShell function

Sometimes you think you understand something just fine – until it stops working, and then you realise you didn’t have a clue. So it was with me and the “Return” statement in PowerShell functions

2013 03 08 Carol powershell Comments (0) Permalink

Breaking down the size of a FIM Service query with PowerShell

When trying to perform bulk operations against objects in FIM from PowerShell you can run into some pretty slow and heavy going queries. This little snippet shows how you can loop through each letter of the alphabet as a way to reduce the size of the batch of objects you deal with in one go. Continue reading ›

2013 03 05 Carol FIM 2010
FIM 2010 R2
powershell Comments (2) Permalink

missmiis

Poll results from the inaugural FIM Team User Group meeting

Navigation Bar Resources not appearing

I’m starting a FIM User Group – and you’re all invited!

Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

Logging failed requests to a SQL table

Workaround for Search Scope Advanced Filter empty search string problem

Some Housekeeping XPath Queries

FIMDelta by Alexey Skalozub

Returning an object from a PowerShell function

Breaking down the size of a FIM Service query with PowerShell

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